Positive parent-school communication

Positive parent-school communication

Positive parent-school communication is vital to both the caregivers, learners, and parents as well. How an institution communicates and interacts with parents influences the extent and quality of parent’s home involvement with their kids’ learning. For instance, a school that communicates unpleasant news such as student’s failure more often than appreciating student’s effort discourages parents’ involvement by making then feel that they cannot adequately help their children. Parents equally benefit from being involved in their kid’s education through attaining ideas from schools on how to assist their children, and by learning more about the school’s academic program and how it works. Perhaps most important, parents benefit by becoming more confident about the value of their school involvement. Parents develop a greater appreciation for the important role they play in their children’s education. Achieving this excellent relationship requires effective communication between the educator and the parent. The educators need to employ effective strategies to achieve effective open communication in a parent conference. The bellow strategies are vital for educators to attain effective open communication with their parents.

Understanding cultural diversity

In a conference with parents, it is expected that educators will meet the parents who will be in attendance. Some of these parents have different cultural practices from the teachers. Cultural differences have the potential to create a communication barrier if the educators express their personalized cultural perspective while interacting with the parents of different languages and cultures (Gonzalez-Mena, 2014). To manage this situation of possible miscommunication, caregivers should consider a quest for knowledge to help them understand their learner’s parents’ background (Karadeniz, 2015). It is vital to caregivers to acquire knowledge on cultural features and master cultural differences and values to eliminate possible conflicts. For instance, a caregiver should consider a single parent mother just as other parents even if it is not a common practice in their culture. According to

Time Conflicts or Making Time

The issue of time conflict affects the parent’s involvement in the conference either through conflict with other events or conflict with the parent’s work schedule. In most cases, caregivers consider the appropriate time that matches their schedule and forget that parents also have their activities to attend. According to Gonzalez-Mena (2014), it is vital if the caregivers forget their agenda and accommodate the parents. For instance, apparent complaining of a conference at 2:30 pm weekdays, it very complicated with the work schedule; it is not easy to break from work to attend such a conference (Baker, Wise, Kelley, & Skiba 2016, p173). It is confirmed that working parents lack adequate time to cooperate with the school. Again, it is also argued that most of the school-parent conferences are converted to money demand situations; several parents with limited economic potentials avoid such meetings (Baker et al., 2016). To manage this case, educators should do surveys to evaluate the work schedule of the parents at the start of the school year, ask the parents about how and when they can communicate with teachers, and the communication hours should be made accommodative to parents.

Improving Communication

Parents and caregivers are all concerned about quality communication since it offers the information and help in the ability of either parents or educators to help the child (Karadeniz, 2015; Baker et al., 2016). While parents consider a barrier to communication to involve the timeline of communication, the quality of the communication, and clarity of the communication, the caregivers view it as a language barrier lack of correct contact information to communicate with families. Gonzalez-Mena (2014) suggests that connecting parents from the same language backgrounds will help them support one another. It is also vital for the institution to find the translator who is competent, as suggested by (Gonzalez-Mena, 2014; Baker et al., 2016).